THE CHRISTIAN ART OF THE CATACOMBS
By Frederic Ozanam
(French Catholic Cultural Historian, 1813-1853)
The Italian genius developed in the atmosphere of the catacombs.
We must descend there to discover the source of all that was destined to
become so great. There, in those primitive ages, lived a people in the
modern sense of the word, comprising women and children, the weak and the
small, such as ancient historians despise and hold of no account -- a new
people, a medley of strangers, slaves, free-men, barbarians, all animated
by a spirit alien to antiquity and suggestive of a new order of things.
This society had an ideal which it was eager to express, but the ideal was
too comprehensive, too impassioned, too new, to find adequate expression
in words; it required the service of all the arts. In that early stage of
its development, poetry was not yet clear, precise, or clothed in the garb
which it needed. But it animated all the arts, architecture, painting,
sculpture, engraving, for all these are symbolic and are characterized by
figurative expression and the endeavor to make the image reflect the idea,
to reveal the ideal in the real.
We must imagine the catacombs as a network of long, underground
corridors, stretching in all directions beneath the suburbs and the
outskirts of Rome. We must beware of confusing them with the spacious
quarries dug out for the purpose of building the pagan city. The
Christians themselves excavated the narrow corridors which were to hide
the mysteries of their faith and to be the resting- placeof their tombs.
These labyrinths are sometimes as much as three or four stories high and
they penetrate a depth of eighty to a hundred feet below ground, but in
many parts they are so narrow and low that it is difficult to make one's
way through even with lowered head. To the right and left are several
rows and broad, deep trenches scooped out of the wall, in which bodies of
men, women, and children are placed side by side and covered with a little
lime. As if to confuse the pagan searchers, the underground passage makes
a thousand detours, and to this day these very detours speak of the
horrors of those early days of persecution when the cruel hunter chased
his prey through these winding labyrinths. For this very purpose of
persecution the corridor was made to wind, to ascend and descend, and to
bury itself in the lowest depths of the earth. But though a work born of
cruelty and horror, it is at the same time an eloquent work. No building
raised by human hands teaches nobler lessons. In those murky passages the
visible world and all trace of light is denied to all who penetrate those
depths. The cemetery encloses all the hidden treasures of darkness, even
as eternity "concludes and shuts up" all time, and the oratories, built at
various points for the celebration of the holy mysteries, are like so much
daylight breaking in upon immortality to comfort the souls for the night
here below.
THE FAITH OF THE MARTYRS
These oratories are covered with pictures which are often crudely
executed and which are clearly the work of unskilled hands. Those
ignorant workmen could do no better, working in haste and by the light of
a lamp, in fear, and threatened with death. Yet often when the light of a
torch is thrown upon the sacred walls, images are revealed whose design,
form, and movement recall the best traditions of ancient art. At the same
time, behind these very traditions lurks the principle which was destined
to reanimate and transform them. The true faith of the martyrs is
depicted in the expression of these beings whom the artist represents with
eyes raised to heaven and hands outstretched in prayer. But in all, the
intrusion of Christian art is revealed in the ideal which chose the
subjects if these pictures, which planned the order of them and designed
the types. In these desolate places, where images expressive of a society
banned, persecuted, and mercilessly tracked might well be expected, are
discovered instead those revealing a very different spirit. At the
entrance of the vault appears the Good Shepherd bearing on His shoulders a
lamb and a goat, indicating that He saves both the innocent and the
repentant. Next, in four panels decorated with garlands of flowers and
fruits, are depicted stories drawn from the Old and New Testaments,
generally arranged in couples, as if to suggest allegory and reality,
prophecy and history. In these figure Noah in the Ark, Moses striking the
rock, Job on the dunghill, the Miracle of Cana, the feeding of the five
thousand, Lazarus leaving the tomb, and most prominent -- Daniel in the
lions den, Jonah cast out by the whale , the three Children in the
furnace. All these are types of martyrdom -- martyrdom by beasts, water,
and fire, but all symbolical of triumphant martyrdom such as is necessary
to depict in order to maintain courage and console grief. We see no trace
of contemporary persecutions, no representation of the butchery of the
Christians, nothing bloodthirsty, nothing which could rouse hatred or
vengeance, nothing but pictures of pardon, hope, and love.
THE TOMBS OF THE DEAD
Though the Christians of the catacombs found time to paint their
chapels, they were zealous never to abandon the tombs of their dead
without endowing them with some token of remembrance, some trace of their
grief and reverence. Christian sculpture had its beginning in such
hieroglyphics, and figures roughly hewn, without proportion, without
grace, with no other worth than the ideal they represent. A leaf
expresses the instability of life; a sailing boat, the fleeting of our
days; the dove bearing the branch proclaims the dawn of a better world;
the fishrecalls baptism, and at the same time, the Greek word which
translates it unites in a mysterious anagram the majestic titles of the
Son of God, the Saviour. On a nameless tomb there is a fish and the five
miraculous loaves of bread, suggesting that here rests a man who believed
in Christ, who, was regenerated by baptism, and who partook of the
Eucharistic feast. As paganism gradually declined, the chisel of the
Christian became bold and more productive. Instead of those indefinite
emblems which he outlined on brick, he boldly cut the marble and produced
the bas-reliefs of his sarcophagi which decorate the museums of Rome and
the churches of Ravenna. In them we meet again the biblical subjects
already treated in the catacombs, but other scenes are added. The richer
and more definite symbolism announces that the time of the persecutions
was over, and that the holy mysteries needed no longer to be celebrated in
secret.
The tombs of Ravenna do not speak of death, everything there
suggests the immortality given by the Eucharist to Christians: for
instance, birds pecking at vines, doves drinking from a chalice, tender
lambs feeding on the fruits of a palm.
But the designer, despairing of expressing his thought adequately
in sculpture, had called speech to his aid, though at first it took a
secondary place. The first inscriptions are a brevity which has its own
eloquence. "This is the place of Philemon." Some are amplified by means of
tender and comforting expressions such as "Florentius felix agneglus (sic)
Dei" -- "Florentius, happy little lamb of God." Or yet again, "You have
fallen too soon, Constantia, miracle of beauty and wisdom". And yet
Constance had died as a martyr and the phial stained with blood marked out
her tomb for the veneration of the faithful. But the young saint was only
eighteen, and the Church forgave the cry of the parents' hearts.
Sometimes these few words suggest all the terror of divine judgement, as
do those in the following prayer which the Christian Benirosus had traced
on his father's tomb: "Lord, take thou not us unawares when our mind is
shrouded in darkness" -- "Domine, ne quando adumbretur spiritus, veneris."
At another time the thought of the Resurrection breaks forth in the midst
of lamentation and weeping. The family of the Christian Severianus
invokes on his behalf Him who causes the seeds buried in the furrow to
germinate.
At this period was produced the only poetry truly worthy of the
name -- poetry expressed in language and metre. The muse could no longer
be silent, for the time was approaching when the poet Prudentius was to
celebrate the catacombs and their martyrs in the metres of Virgil and
Horace. But till now poetry had happily remained popular and crude. It
is surely indisputable that ignorant people traced these Latin
inscriptions written inGreek characters and bristling with faults of
orthography, lan- guage, and prosody, and the picture of the plebeian
mothers, the slave-fathers, engraving stealthily their griefs and hopes on
the stone before which they knelt in reverence, may be readily imagined.
When the persecutors, the true Romans, descended into these cemeteries
they must have laughed contemptuously and shrugged their shoulders at the
epitaphs of these poor wretches who knew not how to write and yet claimed
to teach the world. And truly that is what they were destined to do. The
ancient Roman civilization was declining to its fall, and at that very
moment Rome was to see emerge rom these subterranean passages with which
she was undermined, from that Christian society which she had regarded as
her enemy, a whole civilization and subsequently, an entirely new poetry.
Taken from the Fall 1993 issue of "The Dawson Newsletter." For
subscriptions send $8.00 to "The Dawson Newsletter", P.O. Box 332,
Fayetteville, AR 72702. John J. Mulloy, Editor